Someone had been in there. Not a drifting person, rather someone who came with the evil intent. My hands shook as I walked through the destruction of our small sanctuary. Our earthen pitcher broken, our mirror shattered, the linen cloth embroidered by my grandmother ripped in two. They had poured blood on our bed. Much destruction have I seen in this war, but this destruction was so personal, against me personally, and against your sister, that I almost fainted from the hatred that had been in a room where only love existed before.
I knew my beloved A’lia wrote in this book and kept it in a secret place we made behind the bed. Too many eyes were spying on her, in her living place and in her working place. She could not leave her writings where unfriendly eyes would see them. Thanks be to God that the evil ones did not find our hiding place.
I wish I could keep my A’lia’s book, but too many eyes look upon me also: Iraqi eyes, American eyes, mullah spies. So I send this book of her writings to you. Keep them safe as a sacred memory of your sister’s most noble and beautiful soul. She adored you, and little Clara, and worried constantly over your fates. But God will keep you safe. You are in the country of safety.
I enclose no address, for no letter can come to me that will not be read by many eyes before mine ever see it.
Amani, known to your sister as Desideria
43
Othello Misfires
I’d been so absorbed in Alexandra’s journal that I hadn’t noticed time passing. It was almost three a.m. when I finally finished reading.
What a sorrowful document. At a time in life when Alexandra should have been glorying in the chance to explore the world and her own place in it, she’d been pursued instead by demons. The fierce teachings of her religion, the taunting by her coworkers and boss—perhaps all those things pushed her to a breaking point. Perhaps that’s why she volunteered to drive a truck along the road that led to her death.
Some of the writing showed glimpses of happiness, especially the passages where she described her siblings—Nadia painting a cartoon of Tintrey for Allie, Ernest laughing with her. It was hard to think of them now, Nadia and Allie, both dead, Ernest so damaged he couldn’t speak clearly about his sisters.
You live in the country of safety, Amani had written to Nadia. In the country of safety, Nadia had been murdered, Ernest severely injured.
But nothing showed a connection between Chad Vishneski and Alexandra, except for the fact that both had been in Iraq. Alexandra had worked for Tintrey’s Achilles division. Chad had one of the Achilles shields in his duffel bag. Tintrey had nine thousand employees in Iraq and the U.S. had over a hundred thousand troops there. It wasn’t beyond belief that Chad and Alexandra had met, but she hadn’t mentioned any Chad in the journal.
If I went to Iraq and somehow found Amani, and Jerry the programmer, and Mr. Mossbach and persuaded them, by unimagined means, to tell me everything they knew about Alexandra’s eight months in Iraq and her last day on earth, I still might not find out how she died. If I was going to untangle the story, I would have to do so from the evidence I could find here at home. Clara said her mother and Nadia had fought over the insurance payments the Guamans received after Alexandra’s death. The parents wanted to sue Tintrey, but the lawyer, Rainier Cowles, showed up and persuaded them to accept a settlement.
There was nothing strange about that, or even unsavory, but it so angered Nadia that she walked out of her parents’ home, and was still estranged from her mother when she died. And Clara believed no one was allowed to talk about Alexandra’s death.
I wandered restlessly to the window, carrying my glass. The journal had absorbed me to the point where I’d forgotten to drink the whisky. I parted the blinds, half expecting to see a date tree, but of course there was nothing but snow and ice and a few late-night cars bumping through the ruts.
Rainier Cowles had come to Club Gouge with the owner of Tintrey and the head of the company’s Iraq division to watch the Body Artist’s homage to Nadia. The men’s locker-room jokes gave lie to any notion that they were there out of respect for the dead.
Besides, when I went up to the Tintrey offices, Gilbert Scalia knew exactly who Alexandra Guaman was and how she died. Maybe Tintrey kept track of the Guamans because they feared a wrongful-death suit.
I let the curtain fall. Tomorrow—or, rather, later today—I would visit the Guamans. There had to be a way to get them to talk to me. And then I would buy a very large crystal ball and divine where the Body Artist had gone to ground.